


Chromium

by Nemonus



Category: Star Wars - All Media Types
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2016-01-25
Updated: 2016-06-06
Packaged: 2018-05-16 03:38:44
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 6,249
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5812354
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Nemonus/pseuds/Nemonus
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The First Order is young. Its knight and its captain plan to excavate Sith ruins: she wants to recover a fleet of Old Republic ships, while he explores the tombs of the forebears he both reveres and fears. When they are abandoned by both Phasma's troopers and the grave robbers they hired, their priorities become the same - to survive.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

The stormtrooper approached Kylo Ren with shuffling feet and a coward’s presence.

“Sir, we’ve prepared the shuttle.”

“Good.” Ren didn’t turn around from his examination of the red reflections on the black viewport. He couldn't remember whether he had already been told the time that the mission would begin. There were more important things to think about: his own appearance of unconcern, the trooper’s fear. Behind them, the command pit of the _Finalizer_ was filled with the soft shuffling and beeps of its working. Snoke had given him all of this, but Ren had taken it willingly, and he would not shuffle, and he would not turn.

Eventually, the trooper marched away.

Sweeping in as it did in the trooper’s wake, Captain Phasma’s presence was sharp and scalding, ocean water boiling under bombardment from orbit. This was her natural state, a constant prickling anger. Phasma _seethed._

For a Force user raised with Force users, her presence was refreshingly assertive.

“Sir. The shuttle leaves at 1600 standard,” Phasma said.

“You always know just what to say.” Ren considered turning to look at her, then rejected the idea; she had surely also considered and discarded standing next to him and looking out over the console at the stars. Theirs was a warlike peace, and he would no sooner hold her hand than turn his back.

She would say that she was simply expected to keep her composure on the bridge. "I trust that the route we planned still holds.”

“Yes.”

“A squadron of my troops will accompany us.”

“Us, captain?” Ren narrowed his eyes.

“Did I not mention that part?" Her voice was light, just edging on vengeful glee. "I’m coming with you.”

Neither Snoke nor Hux had mentioned that. Ren’s cheek twitched. “I’m flattered.”

“The Sith Academy naturally traded with the Sith fleet. Some hardy Old Republic ships are still in use today. We could use their firepower.”

“Where are they?”

She moved forward two steps, her boots ringing on the floor, and activated a handheld holoprojector. The click of the activation switch seemed to echo. She held it out in front of her so that she could see it just by glancing to the side: a small, blue map of a slice of the planet, with Ren’s goal marked as a distinct gash. The landing zone was a small red dot, the ships a blue one, the tomb red. The site of the ships was closer to the landing.

“And what equipment do you need to recover them?”

“We will have cranes in the troop carriers, and engineers and pilots who will stay on the site until the ships are operational.”

“First the Old Republic ships, and then the tomb,” he said. “I don’t expect it to be easy to dig either of them up.”

“This tomb, sir. What good does it do us?”

Her question was practical, he thought. She hadn’t been briefed on that particular part of the mission. It rankled him - wasn’t wrong, but rankled him anyway. “It could offer a command of the Force that surpasses all the Sith the galaxy has ever known. It could also be nothing.”

 _And how do you know any of this, Ben? Luke taught you, didn’t he? He put those books and those files in front of you because he thought you could use them to get some perspective, and you_ did _—_

Kylo Ren hunched his shoulders and waited.

“Understood,” Phasma said.

She so rarely said what she was thinking, just left him to _think —_

Ren did not like silences he did not control. “You don’t need to be reminded that I have Snoke’s favor.”

“Your place on this bridge and your lack of rank indicate that well enough,” she said evenly. “The Emperor saw fit to place Darth Vader outside military command. It is only fitting that we should do the same.”

The back of his neck prickled. He wanted to turn to face her, but this wasn’t the right time; not the right time to show either weakness or threat. These things needed to be done according to the right moment. “1600 hours,” he said.

Her armor clicked as she bowed her head and walked away. The officers at their stations were looking at him, Ren thought, even if they weren’t turning their heads. They would sense any weakness that he showed, even if he was the one who could sense their thoughts; he was the new appointee, the man who had once been a traitor to the New Republic and was now stationed at the head of the First Order. The broken artifacts of the Sith of old would teach him as Vader taught him, and they would see —

They were seeing now, weren’t they? He could sense Phasma behind him, walking away, and Hux, in his own quarters working on some paperwork mandating his next slaughter, was a distant burn in the Force. Snoke had given all of this to Ren, and the Finalizer was just the lightsaber in Ren’s hand.     

* * *

Later, she met him in his quarters. She wouldn’t have if her work was not done; she wouldn’t have if he had not chosen to live near the skin of the ship, far from the troop barracks. Phasma’s marks of rank were her armor and her cloak and the blaster at her hip, and she did not dispense of rank where she could be seen.

Ren was aware of the conditions of their arrangement, even if he did not entirely understand her love for them. You weren’t raised on a ship, she had said to him once, and he hadn’t told her about how no one had gone by ranks on the ship he had been raised on.

It was mid-morning for him, the watch from the bridge a morning ritual, but she announced her presence the same way every time: “Eight hour rest,” she said, and tugged her helmet off. This declaration meant that she had decided that she would sleep here whether he was present or not; this also meant that she felt alert enough that she was willing to lose sleep.  

This meant, today, that she showed him her face, the blaster scar pockmarking her pale skin from strong eyes to weak chin, and continued their conversation. He closed the distance between them without taking his helmet off, and this was what it was all about; him being forced by her height to look into her eyes, and then trying to wrest both of their attentions back. They had tried to posture at one another until a collision had seemed a more comfortable condition, and then, well, they still argued and double talked, but never lied.

Never lied about what they wanted from one another, anyway.

“This is the first ground action in some time, isn’t it?” she said, knowing full well that his memory wasn’t _that_ slovenly.

“You're privileged to accompany me on this mission.”

His hands were still at his sides, but she took and lifted them. He told himself that he let her, even as his sight was blurring. She pressed her palms against his and interlaced their fingers. “Oh, I know that isn’t the part that flattered you.”

Her reference to his own adoration of Vader ashamed him, but he had to keep his secrets: she did not know that he was Vader’s grandson, did not know that what he claimed was more than just a self-imposed title and Snoke’s favor. (Oh how he _wanted_ to tell her, sometimes.) She also obsessed over the aspects of the Empire she had chosen. There was greatness in his blood, and Kylo Ren thought that he didn’t need to permit Phasma to know it.

He pressed closer to her, tried and failed to loom. When he tightened his fingers around the back of her hands, pushing the edges of the chromium armor against the weave underneath, she squeezed back and pressured his wrists.

“Don’t patronize me, captain.”

“I keep my personal opinions separate from my professional ones, Ren. Which type of meeting do you want this to be?”

She was avoiding any talk about rank, Ren thought, and that wasn’t what infuriated him. The crux of the argument finally churned up from the ocean of her; she had suggested that Vader had been merely appointed by the Emperor as a matter of course, instead of hand-picked! The gall, the - a slight, only a slight, she probably didn’t even _mean_ it.

Ren tore away from her, screamed between clenched teeth behind his mask. Once he had turned his back to her he had no other place to go except his own bed, and so stood there heaving while his own Force presence lashed out to find something to wreck and found only her.

“I thought so,” she said, and touched the back of her hand to the seal on his mask.

* * *

 It was a cold red morning, and the battalion was crossing the desert.  
  
Phasma watched the line of white-armored First Order troopers crawl slowly over the tumbled ruins of blocky stone columns.  In front of her, the mercenary who had tipped the First Order off to the possible Old Republic ships looked back and forth through bulky macrobinocular goggles looped around his blue lekku.The plas sheet he had brought for protection from sandstorms was draped over a more important item, the long-barreled blaster rifle leaning against his right leg.  
  
“Been a long time since anyone was here,” The Twi’lek, Minev, said. “We told your people the route was impassible.”  
  
“Do you always worry about the methods of the people who have already paid you?”  
  
Minev glanced back at her. “We’ll get you as close as we can,” he said.  
  
The wind picked up, blowing red sand across the weak orange sky over the valley and making Phasma’s HUD brighten in response. Ren was down there somewhere, probably as blinded by his own urge toward Sith history as he would be by the sand. Phasma shook her head, then stilled again when the Twi'lek glanced up at her. He didn't, wouldn't know her name; his people had been already started whispering about the chrometrooper by the time they began to help her engineers with the payload.  
  
Minev shrank back, but rallied when he looked away. More wind gusted, and he pressed gloved hands against the edges of the binoculars to secure them before he spoke again. “Welcome to Moraband.”

 


	2. Chapter 2

The troopers swarmed the ruins. Compared to the First Order troops, Minev’s mercenaries were disorganized and loud; Phasma could hear them from the top of the high dune.  
  
However, they seemed to know where they were going. Several times, Phasma had seen a stormtrooper slide on loose rock or wallow in deep sand. Already her units had lost cohesion, stringing out so that each person could walk in the footfalls of another on the razor slopes and uneven hollows. Phasma let them; it was safer that way.  
  
She re-wrapped her fingers around the butt of her holstered blaster, antsy. Minev might be comfortable up here at a vantage point instead of down with his people, but Phasma was not. Ren would be down there, because he could; he had not informed her of any pre-planned strategy except getting to the hanger first and the Sith Temple second. The canyons were narrow, filled with predators and blocked by fallen boulders, sand dunes, or statuary older than many galactic governments; nevertheless, she took a step down toward it.  
  
Minev still had the binoculars pressed to his face. “We’ll need to blast in a minute. Best stay here out of the way.”  
  
“I trust your ordinance handlers know what they’re doing.”  
  
He didn’t turn around. Bit the inside of his cheek and chewed, turning his face into a red landscape as rippled as the canyons. “What is the First Order doing nowadays, then? Is the New Republic keeping an eye on the mynocks on its borders?”  
  
“Is your goal to lose my business?” Phasma bristled, but it was easy for her to keep her voice cold when she didn’t feel particularly attacked.  
  
“My goal is to treat you the same way I treat any other client that needs my services,” Minev said, without rancor. “Unless you’d like to trek through the ruins yourself.”  
  
She could take whatever revenge she wanted after this. “I’ll offer you the same.”  
  
A moment later, she had the goad that could push her toward the blast sites. “We’re on approach to the hangar,” said her squad commander in her ear.  
  
“Good,” Phasma told her. “I will attend you in a moment.”  
  
There was a crackle in the comm, static or loud movement. Minev didn’t react, and while Phasma didn’t expect him to have heard a transmission sent straight to the speaker at her ear, the imagined slight pleasantly increased her desire to kick his tentacled head in.  
  
She started down the dune toward the canyon. “The mercenaries said they needed to blast the place,” she told the trooper in the comm.  
  
“Yes, captain.” The squad commander’s voice was loud and clear again. Phasma followed the footprints of both groups to a fold in the ground where the land started to descend.  
  
First Order troopers had placed themselves as she demanded, along the perimeter of the route the teams had taken into the wide canyon. Boulders carved with blocky faces, their edges worn and cracked, obscured her view to either side. Maybe this part of Moraband had some ritual significance, or maybe the Sith here had placed their markers everywhere; either way, she approved of the grandiosity of their statements.  
  
Minev’s mercenaries, men and women of various species all wearing layered coats that were mostly black and blue under the red sand, were carting explosives. They looked up when Phasma approached. The Twi’leks’ eyes narrowed; other creatures, with faces she could not read, burbled and stared from faces covered in scales or mounds of skin. Other mercenaries and a treaded, smoking droid were hauling rocks away from a rockfall. She could see just at the corner of it that there was a door behind the mess, thickly reinforced with both stone and sand-coated metal beams.  
  
Ren was standing off to the side, masked, shifting from one foot to the other. Two stormtroopers flanked him. To the right was GK-7284, the reliable squad commander who had already updated her.  
  
“No problems here, captain,” GK-7284 said, unprompted and relaxed. Phasma would have to watch her for that; being calm under fire and speaking out of turn did not always go hand-in-hand. Other troopers, stationed in lines as neat as they could manage in the uneven ground of the canyon, nodded at Phasma as she looked in their direction.  
  
There were stubby trees in the shaded concourse here, while up ahead, past the blast site, the land became starker, striated tan and red and orange. They were going to blast straight through the wall of the canyon to which the large door had originally been attached; possibly, the original makers had used the door as a loading dock and found it easiest just to cut through an outcropping of the land instead of building outward on the tumbled land beyond. How the spaceport itself had been set on this uneven ground, Phasma did not know; she would have recommended elevated platforms, or, preferably, moving to a different place entirely.  
  
One of the mercenaries shouted.  The others picked the sound up, then started to edge back, toward the barriers they had been assigned before the door would blow. Her troopers started to shift too, and Phasma had a moment to wonder whether they shouldn’t back up as well - had anyone even taken notice of them? - before the mercenaries started running.  
  
A moment before the blast, she saw Ren leap toward the door, one end of the ragged cowl unwinding from around his neck and looking for a moment like a web trying to tie him to the ground.  
  
Phasma turned around.  
  
The explosion rocked her forward so that she landed on hands and knees, and the starship armor on her back heated up hot enough that she could feel it through her shirt. Orange sparks flew past her, but most of the fire had gone straight into the wall like it had been intended to do. Phasma started to turn back, to shout at whatever crew had communicated so poorly. Or had sabotaged them, she thought a split second later, and saw the other charges pop on top of the wall.  
  
Three more explosions chained up the canyon. Stacked boulders started to shudder and fall. GK-7284 was suddenly spinning away from Phasma and clutching her own shoulder; if she had hit Phasma, the captain hadn’t even felt it on her armor. A mercenary ran by on the other side screaming, his jacket on fire.  
  
Phasma could see now, through the dust and the roar,  that the walls had been rigged through; what looked like natural piles were weighted traps. The canyon was folding in on itself.  
  
Two rocks struck her back one after the other, ringing off the armor. Phasma was not unbalanced, but GK-7284 disappeared behind a tan wall. Just one avenue now, back toward the blast site. Phasma took it, weaving between falling rocks while detritus pinged off her armor. She caught a glimpse of white above her and saw GK-7284 scrambling on top of a teetering pile where what looked like a curtain of canyon wall had sheered off.  
  
The wall collapsed toward Phasma, rolling over itself like floodwater. A moment before Phasma turned, she saw GK-7284 reach a stable patch, slipping on an outcropping of dirt that had been torn out of the rock. A mercenary crouched on the unstable ground above her; as GK-7284 straightened up, the mercenary flinched, then flung out both hands to help the trooper.  
  
A stone slammed against Phasma’s helmet, making her heads-up display blur. She turned to find the path toward the door blocked with stones and a fallen tree, but if she dug through she could reach an arch left open by the tree itself, and then there was the door. For the last meter she threw rocks out of her way while she gritted her teeth. A sick feeling turned her stomach even as her brain fought it: had her troops been allied with the mercenaries? Had that grab for GK-7284 been a panicked moment of kindness, or the fulfillment of a contract?  
  
She found herself in another arch, this one the remnant of the ruined door. The first blast had done what it had been supposed to do: there was a shaded, opening here into another, narrower canyon.  
  
“GK-7284.” Nothing. Phasma called again, broadcasting a wider channel for any trooper that would be listening, but her comm was entirely static, blips of noise coming through like wreckage surfacing in shifting dunes. “Ren?”  
  
He wouldn’t have been crushed by the rocks, she thought, not if he had kept jumping as quickly as he had been. It was unlikely. If pressed, the idea would collapse like the canyon. She put pressure on a different one instead.  
  
She had thought that Minev had stayed behind his troops, up on the hills, out of cowardice, but in reality, she had nothing to base that on. He had been setting her up, and she had walked into it, and Minev would regret this even more than she had hoped he would before.  
  
More than that, too - because the narrow pathway in front of her didn’t look anything like the entrance to a hangar.  
  
More rocks fell to her right, and red sand billowed up from the other side of the new hill. "Sir?" Phasma said in her comm. Then, when the only sound was the panicked footfalls of the stormtroopers and the clattering of late-falling stones, she tried again. “Ren.”  
  
He shouldered his way around the corner, swaying badly enough that she thought he might have been hurt; there were no wounds she could see in the black clothing, though. He said, “Eight hours?”  
  
“Are you hurt?”  
  
“No.” He brushed sand off his shoulder.  
  
“Good,” she said. If he heard the worry in her voice, she would let him take it and use it.  
  
He replied almost before the one word was out of her mouth. “They tricked us. This isn’t the hangar.”  
  
“Your clairvoyance didn’t suss this out?” she snapped. Her own knowledge of the Force was half hearsay. It had been the mercenaries who brought the walls down, of course.  
  
Her own troops would not turn on her, she insisted to herself. Doing that would be turning on the entire First Order, unless Hux had done it to gain favor with Snoke. And maybe - Hux had feelers all over the program anyway, since it had been partially built by his father. But to turn individuals against the captain who had seen their every bloodied moment? No.  
  
“I am here for the tomb of a Sith Lord,” Ren said, emphasizing every word: he knew he was telling her something she already knew, just in order to drive the point home. “The dark side energy here is strong; it clouds individual presences unless they are very powerful."  
  
She considered whether he was feeding her bantha crap, but she trusted the central idea that he didn't know where the mercenaries had gone, since he wanted to find the ruins here much more than she did. He didn’t have any motivation to lie to her about the Force, some demonstrations of which she had already seen in his training. The particulars didn't matter, especially since she had her own ideas.  
  
"I know where they’re going,” she said.  
  
“How is that, captain?” Ren shook more sand free of his cowl and straightened up.  
  
“We don’t have a line back home; we never put up a droid when we left the _Finalizer_ , and Hux doesn’t expect us back for days. But, I know where the stormtroopers are going. Some of them will be alive, and they will be at a rendezvous point between here and… ” She paused, struck by the possible extent of her betrayal.  
  
Ren stomped closer to her. “What?”  
  
“Where they thought the temple would be.” She enunciated each word with her own spite and the spite he would be feeling in a moment; if Minev had lied to the First Order about one location, he might very well have lied about the second.  
  
“The coordinates are right,” Ren said, his voice colder. “I handed them over myself.”  
  
“So something has been done correctly.” She spoke over his bitter, restrained laugher, and chose not to point out that she still planned to find the cache of ships if she had any chance of doing so. “First the troopers, then the Twi’lek.”  
  
“Are you sure that your troopers aren’t in his pocket?”  
  
Phasma narrowed her eyes, thought of GK-7284 disappearing into the dust. “We do not have to worry about them except that they will have to make a decision,” she said. “The need to rescue us - to get us to the sites we need, as the original mission was - will war with what opportunities may arise for them to find the ships on their own.”  
  
“They won’t be able to find the temple.”  
  
“I know.”  
  
She didn’t say _it is secondary_. He probably knew.  
  
“We must find it,” Ren said.  
  
“We will. And you will see exactly how loyal my troops are.”  
  
“I trust the work you’ve done so far.”  
  
She took the compliment in, let it simmer with the other things that motivated her.  
  
He fell into step with her as she turned and began walking up through the canyon, kicking through the deeper, looser layer of sand further down the slope. The sun was a red wound behind yellow fog. Phasma sighed. She would find her way through this puzzle of a landscape to her troops, scrape up what detritus needed scraping, and get the job done. Ren was particularly lucky that his dramatics were interesting, although she had to remember - did remember - that the damage he inflicted tended to lash back at his own allies. That was the difference between Palpatine and Vader, too; Vader had struck his troops because he was angry, because he wanted to punish them, to rub their noses in the stink of their own failure.  
  
Palpatine punished in order to teach a lesson. The pain he inflicted was slower.  
  
Phasma knew that her own role did not require her to exercise the reach that Palpatine’s had; she thought she could learn from him in plenty of other ways, though.  
  
She and Ren had that in common. They both valued good anticipation.  
  
Phasma glanced at him before looking back down at her feet in order to pick through the broken teeth that were the shattered rocks. It was enough time for him to respond, the jaw of the mask sweeping upward like a blade.  
  
“So there’s to be a bit more hunting in our hunting trip. This should be fun.” The tightness in the words made them menacing instead of jovial. The angrier Ren became, the more he poeticized that anger. In this, Phasma was his opposite.  
  
“Yes,” she said.


	3. Chapter 3

Kylo Ren flinched away from the sound of blaster fire, and felt shame so strongly that his cheeks burned. _You’re not the first dark Force user to be afraid here,_ he thought, and regained some composure. For good or ill, he was living out the legacy he was always supposed to have done.  
  
It was a hot red noon, and the battalions were crossing the desert. Shadows and noises from the top of the canyon told him that his troops or Minev’s or both were up there, trying to get down to commanders who might as well have been buried. He had worked one hand into a fist without even noticing it. Looking at his own glove, he considered tearing down the canyon.  
  
It would take work, sure. It would take prying the strata off of one another like slices of cake, and filling up the space behind him as he jumped from stone to stone, but if he wrecked this planet enough, maybe he could just fly up the walls.  
  
“Do you know how they mine chromium?” Phasma said softly, and the red, wet haze that had covered Ren’s vision faded away.   
  
“Not in any detail,” he said, as if knowing the detail was gauche.  
  
Phasma began to climb forward over the tumbled ground, picking her way carefully through the canyon in the direction of Minev’s troops. She could occasionally hear the sound of machinery, but Minev had apparently planned the false dig site to be at least one curve of the canyon away from the real one.   
  
“The material around it has to be dissolved away. The chromium itself is harder than the surrounding rock, so they send in acid, or geovore droids, and cut it away. The chromium sometimes falls, and calculating how to free it without crushing the equipment is difficult.”  
  
Ren followed her, watching where she put her feet. “And why does this matter to us? Are there chromium deposits in this canyon, waiting to float down?”  
  
Rocks tumbled as Phasma found another handhold and pulled herself over to a slightly more level path. The canyon actually bottomed out here, with a few spiky shrubs clinging to the dirt next to a tiny trickle of clear water. “Simply so that you understand why these starships are valuable enough to trek across this desert for. We could use them in our fleet, but we could also melt them down en masse to find any deposits of chromium. We could clad a ship worthy of the emperor.”  
  
Was she insinuating a lesson, here? Something about her own rarity? That, though, didn’t  make sense. “Yet you keep yours to yourself. How much is that armor worth, then?"  
  
Phasma either was not concerned about this or had expected the question. She told him its weight. “I’ve proven the worth of mine. And it’s just a fraction compared to what may be on these ships.”   
  
He wanted to backtrack, to find a way to flatter her, but the moment had long gone and he felt himself floundering in the attempt to determine whether her words were metaphor. Instead, he said nothing. Thought of the weight of the armor she was holding on her shoulders, thought of the press of her against him. She did not become fragile when they kissed.   
  
Neither her armor nor his black layers were ideal for the heat, though. The sun was edging away from noon, but it had not gotten much cooler. Ren kept moving, watching Phasma’s footfalls in front of him as she carefully chose a stable path. Minev’s Force presence and those of the mercenaries was still in front of them, and for a while Ren distracted himself with the feel of it. He picked out individual presences, other than Minev’s sharp one, almost tasting fear and annoyance and defiance. Some of them hated the First Order; some of them begrudgingly collected their pay. He watched the gold and orange reflections on the backs of Phasma’s legs.  
  
It was less than a kilometer later when they stopped, alerted by both the Force and the sounds of heavy machinery. Minev had not wanted to trek far between his trap and his actual destination. The canyon took an abrupt turn, or perhaps met another fold of the ground made by a different geological force entirely; either way their path ended at a natural stockade of jagged rocks, and the wall on the other side was distant. Ren could hear machinery and shouting.   
  
“This must be the real location of the Old Republic ships,” Phasma said. “We could walk right in if not for those scouts.”  
  
“Why not? They’ve just set up a perimeter.”  
  
“No. There will be a wheeled transport inside; Minev told me in the original briefing this was how he planned to carry the ships out for inspection.”   
  
Ren needed no further suggestion and dropped over the wall. Immediately, he was struck with a sense of mastery over the place; there were indeed mercenaries and wheeled vehicles there, although in a quick scan he couldn’t see Minev.   
  
Judging by their Force presences there was a group of nervous mercenaries just outside the hangar and an equally nervous group of First Order troopers inside. The troopers must have reacted admirably quickly to Minev’s group’s change of direction, but they were outnumbered. Meanwhile, the mercenaries were intimidated, their Force senses crackling with useful anger and frustration, and there was no sign of any heavy weapons Minev had not yet brought to bear. For a moment, Ren contemplated simply dropping down on them, but he considered that Phasma would not have the Force abilities he did; she would not be able to see down into the hangar.  
  
Ren climbed back up the shaded wall, carefully testing his grip on the crumbling, sandy edges of the rocks. When Phasma looked over at him, her armor creaked as she turned; she had remained standing near the wall, her hands held mechanically straight at her sides.   
  
“They’re going after the ships!” Ren said. “Our troopers are holding them off.”   
  
Immediately, Phasma’s stance became less mechanical; she walked to the edge of the cliff with a limber grace and looked down.   
  
“They’ll see you if you stand there,” Ren started, but he also strained forward, knowing that the vantage point would jut be an invitation to Minev -   
  
Phasma reached out one hand to him, open. He leaped forward, the rocks sliding under his boots, and was already launching himself down the slope before she caught his cowl and started to pull him down. His greater balance due to the Force served as an anchor for her as the two of them careened in a half-controlled slide down the slope. Her armor would serve her much better on the landing, though. As they approached the tumbled rocks at the bottom, with less than a meter between the cliff side and the makeshift flowstone hanger the First Order had commandeered, Phasma narrowed her profile and turtled, letting go of the cape.   
  
Ren jumped straight up without waiting to see her hit the wall.  
  
The top of the hanger was flat but not well camouflaged; its designers had used native stone but without any actual intent to blend in. Therefore it was uneven and blindingly hot, reflections glinting off of chips of crystal in the rough-cut stone. His feet touched down, and the building shook with Phasma’s impact.  
  
The troops near the entrance saw him immediately. Because of it, he put another twist in the movement as he activated his lightsaber.   
  
Some of the mercenaries started shouting, while quicker ones brought their blasters to bear. Jedi, he heard among the crowd, while other people cursed. The building shook underneath him.  
  
He was almost sure that the captain would have had to smash straight through the wall in order to get through to the hanger so quickly. She had not been exaggerating about the chromium.  
  
He jumped off the roof feet-first and fell among them like a bird of prey. The first mercenary he menaced was human, helmeted, swathed in armor. “Nice try," Ren said. “But I think the deal is off.”  
  
The mercenary looked around as if for guidance; their compatriots had fallen silent. There were more thumps and shudders from inside the hangar. Ren waved the lightsaber at the mercenary’s throat. “We know Minev wanted to take the ships for himself. Where is he? I might let you live for, say, what he plans to do at the Sith temple.”   
  
“Uh, I don’t know!” The voice was querulous and androgynous. “He headed that way.”  
  
“Which way?”  
  
“Uh, south. Through the canyon. That’s where the temple is, isn’t it?”   
  
“You tell me.”  
  
“I don’t know what Minev wants with it.”   
  
“Huh.”  Ren angled the lightsaber and leaned into it. The mercenaries behind the impaled trooper backed away slowly, but then the First Order troopers inside started firing through the cracked-open door. Something smashed into the door on the other side, maybe one of the wheeled carriers. Ren deflected three more blasts with his lightsaber, almost losing his footing before jumping to a boulder behind which the shooter had been hiding. He caught the offending mercenary in the throat with her own blaster bolt.   
  
A moment later, Phasma and four surviving First Order troopers cracked open the wall of the ancient hangar. Ren felt a surge of heat behind him and jumped for another boulder. As he did, another mercenary got a bead on him; Ren kicked off the wall and came down on the man’s head.  
  
The inside of the hanger was snowy with dust, dark even with Ren’s HUD; he thought he saw metal shapes, but more raw broken rebar and twisted silhouettes than anything that looked ancient, or anything that looked like it could fly.   
  
“Spread out,” Phasma was saying to her troopers. They moved to pick off the few remaining mercenaries.   
  
“This isn’t all of them,” Phasma said, shoving the body of a mercenary off a rock to get the legs out of her path. “There were far more mercenaries than this at the excavation.”   
  
“The temple.”  
  
“We can get there on foot, but one of the atmospheric ships would have been preferable.”  
  
Ren cocked his head at her, then back at the smoking remains inside the hangar. “What a pity that we’ve blown them up.”   
  
“What a pity the fuel from the vehicle Minev brought is very flammable. The metal can be recovered. The engines …”   
  
“Was it necessary to destroy them?”  
  
“They are not completely destroyed. Finding the resources to halt them out and repair them will be difficult with the equipment the _Finalizer_ has at the moment, but we have the troops. Enough of them can excavate anything.”   
  
“These, for instance?” Ren gestured at the four troopers scouting out the rocks.  
  
“I’ll send them to the top of the cliff, if they can make it. Get a signal out while we head toward the temple. Make sure there are no traitors left.”   
  
“That fills me with confidence, captain.”  
  
“Shut up, sir.”   
  
Ren turned toward the curving canyon where the rest of the troopers had fled. Something dark crouched there in the Force, like a fog; it made it difficult for him to tell the real boundaries of the canyon from the ones his mind kept insisting were there.The darkness flowed like a river, and when he stepped off the banks he felt the current tug at him.   
  
“There is something … strange in this place.”  
  
She tipped her head at him, willing to concede to his expertise in the mystical arts but not to offer subservience. “Would you rather go to the top of the cliff?”  
  
Now it sounded like she was challenging him. “No. The canyon will be faster.” Would it?   
  
Phasma nodded. She was always a good trooper, but there were times at which she seemed to relish the fact that they were of an equal rank in Snoke’s eyes. Her power over the troops meant that she needed to think more strategically than Ren did, but that didn’t mean she was bogged down in the coordination of it.   
  
There had never been any problem with some healthy competition.   
  
Together, they waded into the strange Force current.


End file.
